Turnover

Deposit £100 and play a game with a 2% house edge. It is tempting to assume the expected cost is £2 — two percent of the money you put in. That figure is wrong, because the house edge is not applied to your deposit. It is applied to your turnover: the running total of everything you stake.

A single £100 balance rarely produces £100 of turnover. It produces many multiples of it. Winnings are re-staked. Losing spins are followed by fresh ones. The same money cycles through the same edge again and again, and each pass adds to the total the mathematics is calculated against.

Imagine £100 deposited into a game with a 2% house edge and an average stake of £1 per spin. If the balance recirculates through roughly 500 spins before it is exhausted or withdrawn, the turnover is £500 — not £100. The expected cost is 2% of £500, which is £10. The deposit has been "spent" five times over from the edge's point of view.

Raise the average stake, lengthen the session, or add bonus turnover requirements, and the multiplier grows. The percentage never changes. What changes is the base it is applied to.

Casinos report turnover, not deposits, when they describe business performance. It is the figure that scales with revenue, because it is the figure the house edge is applied to. A player who deposits £50 and turns it over thirty times contributes the same expected revenue as a player who deposits £1,500 and stakes it once — the mathematics does not care which route the money took.

From the player side, turnover is the honest measure of exposure. Two people can deposit identical amounts and end the month in very different positions purely because their turnover differed. The deposit is the entry ticket; the turnover is the ride.